PLAINS — Residents in Jimmy Carter’s hometown tried their best to go about their business Friday as their farming whistle-stop prepared for a presidential farewell that will last nearly a week.
Before midday, while crews set up barricades and braced for an influx of visitors from all over, TV news trucks from Atlanta to Jacksonville to Albany, from Savannah to Columbus, flocked to this Sumter County hamlet where Carter was born and raised.
The former president died here in home hospice Sunday. He was 100 years old.
On Saturday morning, the motorcade carrying Carter’s hearse will depart from southwest Georgia. The funeral procession will stop at his boyhood farm on the outskirts of Plains, pass through “downtown” and then drive north to Atlanta. On Tuesday, his remains will be flown to the nation’s capital. The procession will return Thursday afternoon to Plains, where Carter will be buried.
Plains Mayor Joey Recker wouldn’t speculate on how many visitors might pour into town in the coming days. He figures the population, which he puts at 547, will easily quadruple at times.
”We’ve been preparing for this for years — years and years and years. At every level, at the national level, state level and even here in the city. We’re about as prepared as you can be,” he said. “Our biggest thing is that I want to show people what Plains is all about so that when we’re not doing something huge like this, they’ll still want to come back and see us.”
On Friday afternoon, in open lots and in fields adjacent to downtown, security teams and other emergency workers gathered in tents and in makeshift command posts. Flags flew at half-staff. The contingent of governmental agencies included the Secret Service, the Georgia State Defense Force, the Georgia State Patrol and the Georgia Emergency Management Agency.
Inside the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park on the grounds of his high school, Emily Jenkins, a tourist on her way home to Tennessee from Florida, had her picture taken while sitting at a replica of the Oval Office Resolute Desk.
Jenkins, 52, couldn’t help but notice the news trucks on her way into town.
“I don’t think that the hubbub and the press is what (Carter) would want to be known for. ... I think he would be much more interested in people showing up at a Habitat (for Humanity) site,” she said.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
She marveled at the tiny town, the place, as she put it, of Carter’s “humble beginning.”
“I don’t know that somebody now could come from this kind of a background and get where he was,” Jenkins said.
At the Plains Trading Post, a memorabilia and souvenir shop in the heart of town, business already has been brisk in the wake of Carter’s death.
Ordinarily, the shop closes each afternoon at 3:30. “But lately we’ve been open as late as people are still here,” said proprietor Philip Kurland, adding that store traffic has topped what it is during the town’s annual Peanut Festival.
Credit: Miguel Martinez
Credit: Miguel Martinez
Kurland, who is 73, came to know the former president in the three-plus decades since Kurland opened his Main Street shop. He peddles political buttons by the shelfful, along with campaign posters and oodles of knickknacks.
His bestsellers this week? Two buttons, both bearing photos of Carter and late first lady Rosalynn Carter and the words “I Love Jimmy & Rosalynn” and “We Love You Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter.”
“It’s not so much the vintage stuff,” Kurland said Friday. “We’re selling a lot of vintage stuff, but people are wanting to show their appreciation for the Carters.”
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Caitlin Ragusa, an elementary school teacher who lives across Church Street from City Hall, looked around the town from her yard on Friday and saw “lots of people, lots of police, lots of firemen. If we didn’t feel safe before, we definitely do now.”
On Sunday, Ragusa, 31, was walking along main street browsing some of the shops when she learned of Carter’s death.
”Hopefully it’s not gonna make people not come to the town anymore,” she said. “We’d like people to still visit and still come and look at the history, even though he’s not gonna be here.”
Recker said Plains will always be the home of the 39th president.
”To those of us who grew up here in Plains,” Recker said, “he’s our neighbor, Mr. Jimmy. And he is the one that put this little town on the map. And his legacy will be here forever.”
Credit: Arvin Temkar / AJC
Credit: Arvin Temkar / AJC
Not that the former president won’t be missed. Or his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn, who also grew up in Plains and died last year.
Kurland said he enjoyed the occasional visits from the former president and their good-spirited banter.
One day, Carter was browsing the aisles and picked up a campaign button for former Illinois congressman John Anderson, who in 1980 ran as an independent against Carter and Ronald Reagan. Holding the button, Carter grinned and declared, “This is the man that helped me lose.”
Carter, he added, “would always be honest. He was so blunt.”
Kurland said he didn’t have any luck, though, when he asked the former president about the U.S. military installation in Nevada that is notorious for its supposed connection to UFOs.
“There’s only one question he never answered,” Kurland said. “I asked him numerous times about Area 51 and he would not answer. All I got was one of those giant, enormous, famous Carter smiles.”
About the Author
